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Long term data storage

admin — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:18:05 +0000

I’ve had a few people ask me just recently what method I would recommend when planning a long term backup strategy. One elderly gentleman in particular was creating a family time capsule that he wanted his children and grandchildren to be able to view many decades from now.

The question isn’t as easy as you may think. You may imagine that the data could be burnt to CD, locked in a cupboard and that it would last forever however unfortunately this isn’t the case. There are literally hundreds of suitably stored but physically decayed CD’s from my teenage years which I could use as testament to that.

Therefore I’ve made a list of common formats one would usually consider for archiving a large amount of data so you can pick the most suitable one for your needs:

Hard Disk – When used on a regular basis a hard disk will typically last for around 5 years before it starts to decay and if it is being used as an infrequently accessed backup drive then we can assume that this can be at least doubled. Unfortunately degradation of the discs metallic surface, along with the inevitable seizing of parts would still occur over an extended period of disuse.

Optical – Standard optical media includes CD, DVD and BluRay. If choosing this media type ensure that you go for the highest grade money can buy you; a premium brand such as Taiyo Yuden may well last a decade but a more budget brand such as Memorex may only last half that time before the aluminium starts separating from the plastic.

Flash Media – Clearly you would expect that since Flash Media has no moving parts it would be ideal for a long term backup strategy. To an extent you would be right but the published data retention of a unused flash drive is only around 10 years and unfortunately once the device has reached the end of its life it is likely that it will go out in style, taking with it all of the information stored within.

Paper – Rather obvious this one – if left in a dark, dry place then paper will last for many decades; we recently recovered a number of newspapers from 1964 from below the flooring of a building we’re doing up and aside from being a little yellowed they’re in perfect condition. Primary problems do of course include having to find a safe place to store them along with the physical limitations relating to the amount and type of information that can be stored on sheets of paper.

Tape – This may come as a surprise, but Tape backup actually holds one of the best data retention rates hence its continued use in banking and government sectors. Typically a manufacturer will warranty a tape for 30 years with an expected life expectancy beyond that. Although the tapes themselves are affordable and the capacities typically high (between 72GB and 1TB compressed), the actual drives themselves are relatively expensive, starting at £250 for a basic model.

Unfortunately that’s it for this week; we’ll conclude next Friday by covering the remaining options, including a storage media that’s provided with a remarkable 100 year warranty.

Solid State Drives (SSDs)

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 10:43:42 +0000

Of all the technologies found in a modern computer, I would have to say that over the past decade the device that has done the least to raise its game is the humble hard drive. It could be argued that over the years they have enjoyed significant increases in capacity, have become a great deal faster and a fair bit smaller, but for some time now it has been clear that the main storage device for your computer is also its biggest bottleneck.

My first hard drive held 20MB and I’m currently using one which holds 1TB so although I can admit that a 50,000 times increase in capacity is a substantial development, this doesn’t deter from the fact that the technology involved has remained very much unchanged. A hard disk relies on a number of spinning discs, referred to as platters which are then read by a read-and-write head; the closest and rather crude approximation would be to think of a vinyl record being read by a stylus. Clearly the disadvantage of this technology is that it relies on moving parts and hence is limited in speed by the physical restrictions on the device, along with suffering potential reliability problems caused by having several magnetic discs each haphazardly spinning at 7,200 times a minute inside your machine.

A technology that has been threatening to break in to the mainstream consumer market for some time now is the Solid State Disk (SSD) which stores its data on flash memory chips rather than magnetic platters; much in the same way as a little USB memory key, otherwise known as a flash drive. Since the SSD is physically larger than a flash drive there is room to fit a greater number of chips and hence the capacity can be increased accordingly. The speed of the memory used and the actual interface between the SSD and the computer is significantly faster than utilised by a flash drive and hence more suitable for the intensive access required when using it as your main storage device.

With the physical restraints of the hard disk banished, defragmentation is no longer required. Unlike a hard drive which would have to physically move to several positions on the disc to read a file that was split in to several pieces across the platter, it takes no longer to read data from several positions on a memory chip rather than just the one. The lack of movement also results in the drive being completely silent and slightly more energy efficient than a conventional drive.

One might wonder why we are still using the old cumbersome hard drives if such a technology is currently available and unfortunately there is one real sticking point. The price of flash memory is relatively high compared with the production cost of a hard drive platter so while you may be able to pick up a 64GB SSD for around £120 you could pick up a 750GB Hard Drive for half that amount. For this reason you are more likely to find Solid State Drives in relatively high end mini laptops where storage capacity and price aren’t such issues however only a fool would come to the conclusion that the capacity and price difference between the two technologies will remain for long.

Defragmentation

admin — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:02:13 +0000

One of the easiest ways to gain a little extra speed from your computer is to defragment the hard drive every now and again. As your computer uses files it has a habit of splitting them up in to different clusters of data on your hard drive which results in something called fragmentation – rather than storing everything in a neat sequential order your data gets dotted around the place. The result of this is that when your computer comes to use a file that has become fragmented it has to access from several places on the disk which results in slower loading times.

A disk defragmenter is designed to organise your hard disk back in to some kind of order so that your computer has to do less work and hence becomes more responsive. I have in the past talked about this subject but made the mistake of suggested the defrag utility supplied with Windows; whilst it does do a good enough job, it is undeniably slow. I am instead this week recommending the Defragger application that can be downloaded free of charge from www.defraggler.com.

Once installed, just select the drive that you wish to defragment and you will be presented with a pie chart depicting the used and free space on the drive – to get the most efficiency from the application try to ensure that you have at least 15% free space available. Now click the analyse button and the application will return a map of your hard drive showing the scale of the fragmentation on your drive so that you can be sure that defragging is actually needed. Providing you are satisfied, just click on the defrag button and the application will work away in the background to restore your hard drive to some kind of order. Whilst working it will provide you with an evolving map and status bar so that you can check on its progress.

The entire process will take typically around an hour or so depending on the size of hard disk, degree of fragmentation and speed of computer. You are welcome to carry on using your machine whilst your data is sorted and there is even the option to select a ‘background’ mode which will result in the whole process taking longer but your machine will suffer less slowdown. The application can also be selected to defragment individual files or folders therefore saving time if you only want to correct the most severely affected files.

I am eager to stress that defragmenting is something that you should do only occasionally. I’ve known people who run a utility such as this on a daily basis and with this degree of usage any time saved in loading operations is more than offset but the time taken actually running the utility. You will always have fragmentation on your hard drive so the trick is to ensure that it doesn’t get to the stage where it is adversely affecting your machine and blasting this utility through every couple of months should do the trick.

Undelete Plus

admin — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:00:32 +0000

Although I have covered this subject before in the past, I am still getting a large number of people regularly e-mailing me asking how they can undelete a specific file so thought it might be time for a quick recap.

The Windows recycle bin is a godsend for many users as in the majority of circumstances a deleted file will be transferred to the recycle bin so it can be quickly recovered if necessary. There are some instances however when a deleted file won’t go via the recycle bin or alternatively the bin will be emptied before the mistake has been discovered. However fortunately there is usually still a way to retrieve the data.

In order to understand how this is possible, we need to understand a little more about how your computer manages deleted files. When you request that Windows deletes a file, rather than actually physically removing it from the hard disk it simply marks the space where that particular file was stored as being free. It’s not until the computer tries to save another file in the same space that the file is then truly erased; it is for this same reason you should always be careful to fully erase your data with a specialist application when selling your computer so no data can be recovered.

There is no way of telling when Windows will choose to start reusing the space where your deleted file was once stored and as such the use of an undelete program won’t always guarantee that you will retrieve your data. A good analogy I heard recently is that recovering a deleted file is a similar experience to losing a contact lens at a party. The process of the lens falling out of your eye and dropping on the floor is unlikely to damage it so if you were to immediately yell “nobody move” and retrieve your lens then you would probably be able to recover it. If, however you were to allow the party to continue for 15 minutes then chances are that with the general movement around the room that your lens would be destroyed. Using your computer even for simple tasks such as browsing the Internet involves a certain amount of data being shifting around the hard disk and as such increasing the probability of data los.

In order to minimise the amount of disruption caused when you do accidentally delete a file it would be best to download and install an undelete utility such as the fantastic free of charge application Undelete Plus (www.undelete-plus.com) BEFORE you actually have the need to use it.

You can choose to do a general search for all recoverable files however the sheer number of files that are created and deleted by your computer on a daily basis without your knowledge means that you will almost certainly be presented with several tens of thousands of files that can be undeleted. Fortunately the program allows you to sort these in to categories (applications, music files, pictures etc) as well as filtering the results by name, size or modification date of the file. Once you have located the file(s) simply tick the appropriate checkbox and then the ‘Start Undelete’ button and the program will restore it to the original location; simple!

Computing Myths #2

admin — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:28:07 +0000

Last week I started a list of my most hated computing myths and began setting the record straight. Unfortunately there were simply too many of them to fit into a 600 word article so we’re back again this week to hopefully complete the list.

Unnecessary Screen Savers

Screen Savers have been redundant for many years now but yet many users still insist on having them on their machines. The idea of a screen saver stemmed from the days of monochrome monitors; these had a tendency to suffer an incurable ‘burn in’ if a still image was left on the screen for an extended period of time. Fortunately modern monitors, especially TFT’s, don’t suffer from this affliction so there is absolutely no reason to have your screen saver turned on. A better idea would be to have your PC automatically switch the monitor to standby mode after a set period of time as this would save power and extend the life of the monitor. To activate this feature head to control panel, double click on the power options icon and then select how long you would like the PC to wait before the monitor is switched in to standby when it’s not being used.

If you don’t ‘stop’ a USB device before unplugging it from a PC you’ll mess it up.

If you unplug a USB device before stopping it correctly from within Windows then it will most likely make a violent sound often followed by your Operating System scolding you for removing the device without disconnecting it first. Whilst it is true that if you do this with a device such as a flash drive or USB hard drive whilst it is juggling data around that some real damage can be done there is no real reason that unplugging a printer, scanner, camera and so on without first stopping it will cause any damage to the device.

Overzealous Defragmenting

I have covered defragmenting before in Click but very briefly I’ll quickly recap for those who are unsure what I mean by this term. A computer will not always write a single file in a continuous space on the hard disk but will often write the file in several pieces on the drive in whatever space is available. Over time this can lead to the drive becoming ‘fragmented’ which results in the computer working harder, and as a result taking longer when accessing the hard drive as the data has to be read from several different areas of the disk, rather than being read in one continuous stream.

A defragmentation program, such as the one provided free in Windows, is used to reorganise the files of the hard drive so that, where possible, a file is always stored in one piece rather than scattered across the drive. The problem is that these programs can become addictive and often lead to an obsessive desire to have every file on your hard drive defragmented. I know people who run these utilities several times a week and the simple truth is that there is nothing wrong with a fragmented drive. Modern Operating Systems attempt to keep fragmented files to a minimum and even a large amount of fragmentation will make a relatively small difference to your overall system speed.

Whilst we’re on the subject, it is worth noting that it’s quite normal that some files cannot be defragmented; this is because they are being used by Windows and as such they can’t be moved around. There are ways to get around this but since this space is more often that not occupied by temporary virtual memory, it really isn’t worth worrying about.

I can’t argue with the fact that if your hard drive is genuinely very fragmented then running a utility such as Windows Defrag can result in some modest speed increases but please, don’t get in to the habit of doing it more than a couple of times a year. Every so often someone will tell you about how they spend two hours a week defragmenting their hard drive and the vast difference it makes but please, ignore them.

Virtual CD’s

admin — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 16:19:48 +0000

Even in the current day where the majority of software is downloadable, there are still many programs that require a CD or DVD to stay in your drive in order to function. Most notable are games which often don’t install themselves fully in order to save disc space and reduce the chance that they will be copied. Having to have a disc in the drive isn’t always ideal so this week we’re going to talk about virtual drives which can alleviate this necessity.

One program I’ve had particular experience with in the past is Alcohol 52% free edition which can be downloaded by heading to www.alcohol-soft.com. Do bear in mind that this free edition isn’t the core product offered by Alcohol Software so do make sure you look carefully and avoid downloading a 30 day trial for one of their more extensive versions by mistake.

Once installed, the software will allow you to create up to six virtual CD or DVD drives on your hard disc and these will then act to Windows as though they were real drives connected to your computer. Simply load one of your existing discs on to a virtual drive and it will stay present until you decide to delete it, even if you remove the physical CD from the drive or restart the computer.

There are several benefits to using a virtual drive but one of the most common applications is to back up existing physical media that you use frequently so that you don’t have to worry about losing or damaging the disc. Once you’ve created a virtual drive on your hard disk and copied the application from the CD or DVD you can then safely store the disc away without fear of anything happening to it.

The access time of a hard drive is a lot faster, so if you often play the same game you may find it beneficial to put the whole lot on to a virtual drive and then benefit from substantially reduced loading times; the reading speed of a virtual CD for example is 200x.

Some users may find another useful application is the ability to run multiple discs simultaneously; if need to use several different applications that all require their disc present during runtime then unless you have multiple drives you will soon become stuck. If you were to instead create several virtual drives then you could dispense of disc swapping entirely.

Of course, you may well wonder why bother with the effort of emulating a CD or DVD drive and that if you wanted to store the data from a CD or DVD drive on your hard disk then you should just drag and drop it over using Windows Explorer. Unfortunately, the primary obstacle in this instance is usually the copy protection employed when the data is recorded to the disc; very many applications will detect that they’ve been copied to a hard disk and then refuse to function. Alcohol 52% mimics the conventional CD or DVD format perfectly and also emulates many of the well known copy-protection methods to ensure that the disc you copy to your virtual drive has the best chance of working perfectly.

Weighing in at only 6.7mb Alcohol 52% is a very small application and the only negative point that I can come up with is that it’s bundled with the Alcohol search toolbar which installs itself automatically. The toolbar is next to useless and you should ensure that one of the first things you do is to remove it using the supplied uninstallation program. This minor point aside, Alcohol 52% is a very capable piece of free software and I certainly wouldn’t hesitating in making a recommendation to those who could have a use for it.

DBAN

admin — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 15:09:36 +0000

My business partner at our webdesign company Refresh Creations recently started talking to me about wiping all data from a computer that I was set to sell on eBay. The computer in question had a fair amount of sensitive information on it and he seemed horrified that I was just going to wipe the hard disk using a Windows format and then sell it on.

For all intensive purposes what I was about to do would have been fine but to be on the safe side he introduced me to a piece of software which does a much more thorough job. I thought it might be prudent for him to talk my Click readers through this program as it could certainly come in useful for anyone looking to sell their computer or hard drive on the second hand market.

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With data security becoming a greater issue on a daily basis it’s important to make sure that you securely remove all your data from your hard drives before you decide to sell your hard drive or donate it towards a charity of your choice. For a great amount of time there have been programs available which can miraculously restore data from a damaged floppy disk, with being the token computer guy in the house at university and still people using this decidedly unreliable format I became familiar with the programs used for restoring corrupted or deleted data from the diskettes.

Technically just deleting a file isn’t sufficient to get rid of it permanently; when you delete a file from say Windows XP or any other OS you’re not truly deleting the file. To understand this you need to have a rough idea of how file allocation tables work (this is based on the current format of your hard drive). Unfortunately formatting the drive isn’t necessarily sufficient as data can still be relatively easily restored using an unformatting program which are available readily on the Internet.

If you’re intent on selling the drive off to a 3rd party personally I’d recommend the free tool DBAN (Darik’s Boot and Nuke) which is used for securely erasing all data from your hard drive, making recovery of previous data from your drive nigh-on-impossible. DBAN performs a military grade format on your hard drive, conforming to American DOD (Department of Defence) standards.

DBAN is more effective than the conventional Windows format as it performs multiple passes over the hard drive, on each pass it will randomly flip each binary bit from a zero to a one or vice versa to completely scramble all the data on the drive. Multiple passes are required so traces of the old data are more difficult to detect. DBAN is a small, free piece of software which can be downloaded from http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Note it’s name “BOOT AND NUKE” – The CD that you create will be bootable when you turn on the computer with CD booting enabled the program will load automatically and if you’re not careful you will lose ALL data on the drive. This includes the OS and anything else on the drive – ALL data means ALL the data.

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My thanks go to Ryan Carson for providing this article. Please do be careful with this utility as careless use can cause a loss of data which neither myself, Ryan or the Herald Express will be held responsible.

Firefox Extensions

admin — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 15:08:55 +0000

Many of my Click articles end up with me banging on about how good Firefox is and how all my readers should consider using it as their main browser over Internet Explorer which is bundled free with Microsoft Windows. Since one of the main arguments I use is the large amount of third party add-ons that are available I thought this week I should probably corroborate that thinking by naming a few of them.

Add-ons (otherwise known as extensions or plug-ins) aren’t pieces of software in their own right but rather small bits of code designed to integrate with an existing application in order to extend its capabilities in one way or another. Firefox like many other browsers on the market encourage users to take advantage of this facility so that they can extend their browser in a way that suits them.

I’ve picked a few of the most popular plug-ins available, all of which are available free of charge by going to ‘Tools’ and ‘Extensions’ from within Firefox.

Adblock Plus – Whilst Firefox itself stops the majority of pop-ups you can still find some pages have intrusive adverts which Adblock Plus aims to stop. Install it into Firefox and immediately banner ads and other intrusive adverts will be removed from your browsing experience resulting in less interruptions and faster download times.

FlashGot – FlashGot is used to download entire sites quickly and easily which can be useful for offline browsing as it removes the necessary to save pages to disk one page at a time. It also includes a build gallery function so you can download and store every image from a site quickly and easily.

Video Downloader – Watching videos on the Internet is certainly handy but often if the video is embedded into the page it is difficult to save it on to your hard disk. If you install this add-in you will be able to click one button to save it to your computer permanently.

Tab Mix Plus – This extension improves the tab capabilities of Firefox to include features such as duplicating tabs, reopen closed tabs and a session manager which can save and restore combinations of tab windows should Firefox run in to trouble.

Torrent Search – My more astute readers will remember me talking a bit about Torrents a few weeks back. This plug-in allows you to easily search for downloads in more than 27 of the top Torrent search engines. This is a subject I’ll be covering more thoroughly in a future article but if you missed the original article please check out www.computerarticles.co.uk.

Answers – Once installed simply hold down the key and click on any word present on a website to get details on what the word means along with related references.

Search Status – This is one of my favourites and a must for anyone involved with creating and promoting their own website. Search Status displays the Google PageRank and Alexa report of any page that you visit so you can immediately tell how popular it is – especially useful for comparing your sites against the competition. I’ll be giving a crash course in using PageRank and Alexa to promote your website online in a future article but in the meantime this plug-in is certainly worth installing so you can get a feel for these two systems.

It’s worthwhile noting that many of the above plug-ins are also compatible with Opera so even users of this browser may find it still worthwhile checking out addons.mozilla.org. Of course there are extensions that focus on Internet Explorer but as I am trying to convince my readers to switch allegiances it will be a while before I cover these in Click.

Kubuntu

admin — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 15:03:13 +0000

Last week we talked a little bit about Linux and I introduced you to a program called Slax which served the purpose of being a perfect introduction for those new to this Operating System. The big downside to Slax was that it wasn’t really designed for installing on to a hard drive and so didn’t really lend itself to being used as a long term alternative to Windows.

This week we’ll take a look at a Linux Operating System which is designed to be installed either as a direct replacement or installed permanently alongside the Microsoft offering going by the name of Kubuntu.

Because Kubuntu is based on the KDE graphical interface those of you that tried out Slax last week will find this variant of Linux extremely easy to get to grips with. Where it differs is that Kubuntu isn’t designed from the ground up to be easily portable and as such it comes bundled with more software and is also easily installable on your hard drive.

By heading to www.kubuntu.org you can download the 700mb package free of charge. This software can then be put on to a bootable CD so that your new Operating System can be tried out before you choose to continue with the installation. The problem here is that Kubuntu runs pretty slowly off of a CD so don’t let this put you off putting it on to your hard disk.

The first time I used Kubuntu it set up and installed pretty much all my hardware (with the exception of my printer) automatically without any intervention and I was up and running on the Internet immediately. This is pretty impressive when you compare it to the half hour installation routine that is involved when setting up Windows for the first time.

Included with the default installation is a range of tools for your graphics, multimedia and Internet applications as well as the extremely capable OpenOffice package which is used as a direct, free replacement for Microsoft Office. I have reviewed OpenOffice for Windows in the past and found it to be quite a capable package consisting of a Presentation, Spreadsheet, Database and Calculator utilities as well as a Word Processor. Of course if you need to use an application that isn’t included as part of the default installation this can be easily done by using the inbuilt add/remove programs manager. A bonus of using a Linux based Operating System is that pretty much all the software that you’ll ever obtain will be legally free of charge.

As mentioned at the beginning of this article the User Interface is based on KDE which is fairly similar to that of Windows and so most users shouldn’t have a problem finding their way around the basic functions of the Operating System. The system is relatively easy to use and when installed on the hard disk the performance is impressive especially when compared with Windows on lower specification hardware.

I’m certainly not suggesting that Linux is the ideal solution for everybody as to do so would be hypocritical as I personally still use Windows in my day to day life however Kubuntu is certainly worth looking in to especially if you have a lower hardware specification or resent having to pay every couple of years for the latest version of Windows.

Pretty much any variant of Linux is completely free of charge so you can download and experiment to find out which one suits you the best however the two versions Slax and Kubuntu I have reviewed are certainly good places to start.

Fresh Software

admin — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 15:01:29 +0000

Several pieces of software came to my attention just recently; all four of them published by the practically unheard of ‘Fresh Devices’ company and available completely free of charge from www.freshdevices.com. I spent an hour this afternoon trying them out and thought they were worthy of inclusion in Click.

Fresh Download

Fresh Download is a download manager that replaces the bog standard file downloader built in to your existing browser. It supports opening multiple connections to decrease download times off slower websites, includes the ability to pause downloads as well as resuming those that failed part way through. The program is easy to use and can be integrated with either Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and many other browsers that work in any version of the Windows Operating System.

Fresh Diagnose

Fresh Diagnose is used to analyze and benchmark many kinds of different hardware in your machine in order to gain more information about a specific component or to measure its speed. Benchmarks can be performed on practically any part of your system such as your processor, hard disk, memory or alternatively it can be used to give you an overall impression as to how fast your computer is running and how this compares against other machines.

Fresh UI

Fresh UI is a tool designed to configure and optimise Windows. Once you’ve installed the software you will be able to change hundreds of hidden settings not usually accessible from within Windows itself from within what looks like a simplified version of Windows Explorer. You’re offered a variety of areas of the system that you would like to alter which include Applications, Explorer, Hardware, Windows System, Windows Interface and Covering Your Track. Within each of these categories are a huge number of different settings that can be easily changed to suit your personal preferences.

The majority of settings you’ll probably want to leave at the default settings but I can guarantee that everyone will have one little grumble with Windows that they would change if they had this utility installed on their machines.

Fresh View

Fresh View is a utility which allows you to organise and view images, audio and video present on your system – you can use it to listen to music or to view pictures and movies saved in practically any format. There are dozens of other programs that perform this function at least as well as Fresh View it is still worth a look due to its small file size and simplistic interface.

I’ll be honest with you in saying that none of these programs are going to change the world and for the most part each one of these utilities covers ground that has been walked a thousand times before. Having said that however I would still urge you to give them a go as each utility is well designed, easy to use, small in size and accomplishes exactly what it says on the tin – nothing more, nothing less.